I searched every contact on my phone, but what drunk man would have remembered the simple rule of saving a goddamn number before taking a complete stranger to bed. At least find out if she had a working telephone number as some sort of background check. Did I not even think of the countless diseases that filled these streets? Syphilis? Gonorrhea? The flu for crying out loud. This was basic textbook knowledge, and the mode of transmission: sex.

After a few minutes of trying to find any possible excuse to be mad at the situation and making myself a victim, I couldn’t deny her. I couldn’t deny her access to completely consume my thoughts. Strangely I felt a homesickness for a girl I barely knew, but all my senses desired her. I was on the side of some highway bridge wondering how I got here. Like my touch would never feel it’s ultimate capacity until it was her skin I were touching. My brain had never released this toxin called euphoria until it was her voice in my head. And words I have read or said before were nothing in preparation for her speech.

Any chance to nip it in the bud had expired the moment my lips swelled upon initial contact. When my glands went into overdrive and my mouth watered for her taste. There was the release and I wanted another dose, a hit to suffice.

I couldn’t hide my face, my son of a gun pathetic face of an emancipated man. Should I hide in the bathroom? What did I have to hide from? But the lunch room felt too exposed, who knows who I would see, Laura in research? Steve from downstairs? The florescent lights and coffee stains only made me feel more claustrophobic. The recycled air only strangled me more.

Her response: On what kind of terms?

He response reached my lungs with crisp air and vulnerability- her name was Lila.

3.

“I have to get this,” which is what I’m pretty sure she said. The club hardly provided any acoustic for talking. I nodded as she walked off the floor. Must be one of her clients. The MDMA wasn’t supposed to hit for fifteen more minutes. I usually calculated all my hits, dosages and highs- timing a perfectly orchestrated phenomenon.

The last time I was rolling on stimulants, I threw up behind a warehouse on the North Shore. It felt nauseating, throwing up blasphemy at someone’s workplace. The cold shriveled up my spine, and the winter breeze hit my throbbing body. It was the furthest feeling from security, feeling so vulnerable out in the open. It killed my high instantly. I so badly wanted to wipe away the acid, but it only stained my clothes and followed me home until the next morning.

When she returned, it was everything I needed on a night like that. Warmth, embrace, comfort, stability in her veins and finally a pulse of euphoria. Pure pure joy. Simple dumb happiness. I scanned her down, from glossy eyes to powerful lips, and I started smiling- just like that.

You’re already my favorite place to be.

She broke me down, every enzyme churning and dancing starting with her lips, masticating in forms of small unknowns, till there was no discernible sight of myself. Just a molecule of what once was me. Food moved down to the stomach through the esophagus via a process called peristalsis. Her peristalsis were rhythmic waves of squeezing and pushing food through the gastrointestinal tract, where her gastric acids lure me and fool me into my death and demise. Take me as your man, and slice and dice up my pieces, and I will serve myself onto you. This was pure unadulterated fun.

Drug rose, music ascended, desire induced. I was high. I could feel it injected in my nervous system. My heart beat pulsating through my fingertips. An atomic bomb dropped and released the soothing calm within the corners of my skin. As if all the leaves off the tree were falling into place. Thoughts sequestered into a single harmony, and internal butterflies guided me. Rocking my head, back and forth, my body just felt hypersensitive yet detached. My nerves were dancing, my bones were weightless. I pulled her, pressing her backside into my frontside, feeling her body stimulate all of mine. Every fabric of her dress, sleeves, strand of hair overrode my senses. Into her eyes I gazed, her face turned scarlet red, her moody hazel eyes turned into fire. She was singing to me. Words started to hit vibrations, but the melody rose high and in the lyrics I heard her sing:

Warm, warm is I

Who am I, to call her mine

and sky, sky above

rain and cloud, she is blind

hold, hold me close

warm is blood to her pulse

and god, tell me why

she is fine, oh so fine

I desired her. And I wasn’t afraid of losing something I wanted so much. And this freeness, liberation stretched out my limbs and muscles so far that I could cover her entire being under my body.

I was so happy, I could die. If you happened to find my exposed carcass littered along, left by the wayside of other millennial inhabitants that didn’t make it past their prime, please lift up my entrails and whatever is left of my skin, hair, and pass it up for the gods. Maybe this goddess could take pleasure in this fool’s untimely death by happiness.

Out my mouth came the words I love you. The words lifted chains.

4. Fallout

Commonwealth Ave was still alive, undergraduates lined the streets, the girls in their all-black ensembles, trying to get into one Allston frat house or another. Wearing thick coats in the dead of winter, just to hide some skimpy number underneath. Those girls used to please my every need in college. I would act so nonchalant around them, yet my every action served to please them. Secretly hoping that one of them would give me the time of day, laugh at my quick witted remarks, and not choke if I went in for a slight flirtatious peck. They were all victim to my immature game of please feed my desire for attention.

I felt young again being once again surrounded by my youth- and yet more aged and refine with Lila grasping my arm as we waltzed down the side streets. We laughed and cried, sharing stories of our fathers as young children. Her father forgetting her at Disneyland, and my abandonment at school for hours. Once quite pitiful memories just bursting at the seams- everything was amusing. I didn’t have the consciousness to worry about the neighborhood, who laid inside trying to sleep when these two, too old adults, crackling and crowing like schoolchildren.

A Wellesley girl like herself had never been subjected to Boston . The wild random nights meeting strangers at midnight, then the slight eeriness of 2 am, when the city went quiet. She talked about her college days, her thirst for expression in Catholic high school, translated to the strong community of feminism on her all girl’s school campus. Sexuality was constantly prowling the campus dorms and classrooms. I asked her if the rumors were true, ignorantly not knowing better. But she answered mildly, not offended, “Everyone isn’t gay, but a lot were bisexual, or at least exploring it. But most of them were classic overachievers, very Mona Lisa Smile, and slightly brash in conversation due to being socially stunted.” Then came a couple misogynist run-ins with elitist Harvard boys. She explained the money and ego flooded these young men’s minds, and having a Ivy League title didn’t hide the fact they were still just 18 year old kids on their own for the first time.

At this rate we could’ve walked all the way to Chestnut Hill via Brighton. But she insisted we talk the night bus back to her place in Cambridge. Which I admit was the better plan, my apartment was infested with roommates and unknown nightly visitors. At her’s we could stay up all night, undisturbed in her one bedroom walk up.

“Have you ever had an innocent sleepover with a classmate that turned into something else?” I asked. Her tongue played with her lips, as if to tease me, making me hard for her answer. Young Lila finding her own body and identity amidst the sea of young foolish Wellesley girls, made me feel a new tingle of desire, for her and for the 18 year old Lila.

I had a sudden drop in my stomach, I would never know that Lila, a girlish brevity that followed her teenage years. I pulled her in with both arms, taking a whole inhale of her hair, the nape of her neck- never allowing myself to let go of this. I had Lila the woman, the accomplished young mental health therapist, the forgiving and beautiful starlet of New England. An entrepreneurial young spirit, working as an independent counselor, securing herself a steady life. Her success made me a bit envious.

5. I’m not OK

There’s a point in one’s life, after long exhausting periods of “discover” and search for meaning, one comes to realize that there are no answers. There is no meaning.

Then a sudden and dreadful silence fills you up. You are your most alone and vulnerable. The hole sinks deeper, darker, and colder. The hold becomes permanent for those who cannot see the light, “What’s the point?” No one is going to give it to you. No god, human, children or creature. No one will give you anything. In this chaotic, codependent, society of barbaric individualism, people neglect the broken, the weak and homeless and look with distain. Religion can comfort some temporary relief, because then you are surrounded by the same reality, the truths you adhere by. And suddenly life becomes a little more bearable. Morals, values, ethics all necessary in companion to match yours, a tiny bit closer to your “reality.”

Depression became my obsession. Sure it is an illness, in the same way a deficiency or a blood clot can lead to death. But I’ll tell you something, then everyone is sickly ill, because it is in our nature to be prone to mental illness. Some have it better than others, a web of their class. Some who are naturally less prone to feeling the disease thanks to their genetic makeup. Others who have been blessed with great nurture. And then there is me, one not born of privilege, exposed to the disease.

Researchers like myself are either too optimistic or pessimistic about one’s own life. We accept the fact that our decay will return to soil, so that some nutrient can soak up our nitrogen and help reproduce new life. The optimistic ones relish the idea, while those such as myself don’t care when our timely demise may occur- because our bits and pieces of us will just return. Biogenesis will take care of any afterlife I may want for myself .

Jennifer was my gateway drug, dragging me into the scene of depression. The wound wouldn’t have been so deep if I hadn’t allowed her to cut me. I ignorantly consumed her words and the subsequent lies, unknowingly setting myself up for immense pain. I believed it, every lie she built up. She quietly slit a small cut on my peripheral, and to my unawareness it only grew deeper, until one day the truth spilled out like hot acid down its trenches leaving third degree burns on my consciousness. A whole blanket of numbness engulfed me. My body went into auto-drive and my person pulled back from my skin. For days, months, my mind took a backseat and I let my body run automatically. Not even realizing my own breathing, hunger or pain. I couldn’t even describe it to my friends or family without choking. I was more in disbelief than angry. Soon I just became angry at myself as if I knew it all along, that I wasn’t good enough for a monogamous promise. I was cheated on. Cheated on an idea I didn’t deserve.

Jen. Jennifer. Did I have the right to call her Jen at this point? Or was I sentenced to a forever of Jennifer. She was still saved on my phone as Jen. Easy, simple, Jen. My college sweetheart, four years attacking university together. The beauty of having her with me, having a partner to awkwardly fumble around with, discovering and pleasing my first woman. She made me a man, she made me decent, she made me desirable. We were the class favorite, a crowd pleaser. Known on the dorm floor as “that couple” and it was a known fact that she slept in my room every night during junior year. My marriage proposal was some sort of last attempt to keep her. I needed her, because I couldn’t bare be with anyone else. When she accepted the offer in Duluth, I proposed. I could’ve handled Framingham or even Providence, but to go north was too far for my infant heart to sustain.

Maybe it was the lack of warm ocean current in her new city that made her reach for synthetic warmth in a kind stranger. Any excuse would’ve been better than her blaming me for emotionally stunting her, and holding her back from dating other men. To have married me, and be stuck to me for an unforeseeable amount of time made her claustrophobic and scared. When living a life without her made me most fearful.

By the time I regained consciousness, the act was done. Scattered sheets, and a distinct dampness on the bed linens of prior night’s sweat and exhaust. 7:28 am. Shit. Condom. Condom? Yes, there was one on the floor, soaked up like a used tissue strewn by the bed side. Just two feet from the trashcan- missed- in an obviously foreign room.

Sick. Excretion of my own juices, I was disgusted. All the sex education in high school had just barely caught it’s way in what happened last night. And yet I still felt like a pathetic school boy, having primitive naive pleasure immediately result in guilt, shame, and regret. Worried that someone would walk in the room, mid-masturbating, exposed, cock in hand, humiliated.

But my god, I had done it. Was it actually good? Or another embarrassing ass move for the books. Another journal entry of regret. The memories started rolling back on screen, right before the ringing headaches stormed in. I could see last night’s dark bar and late happy hours. As incessant thumping hit, from left ear to mid-cranium- the hangover entered, and last time it was here, it stayed for a harrowing night or two. When it felt like man’s strongest ale seeping into the mind- death. I’m too old for this shit.

Jennifer’s 27th birthday came to mind, when we were still in that awful “I graduated but never made it out the dorm” apartment. That took the weekend to recover that one. We had a decent place in Mission Hill, a dwelling that secured four ex-Berkeley boys a home rather than returning to some horrid place in the mid-West.

Footsteps. She entered, “Sorry, did I wake you?”

“No, no, not at all.”

“Oh good. It’s just that I usually wake up early for work.”

“Then I’ll get going. I don’t want to overstay my visit.”

“No, it’s ok.” Her voice grazed lightly on the morning. “My client just canceled for the day, so I was hoping we could just stay in bed a little longer?”

I nodded, my sign of modest approval to her soft desire that made so much sense in the daybreak. Standing at the doorway, she made her way back to bed, pulling the lush covers over her, and our legs returning to intertwine.

To touch a woman’s skin, feel each sun kissed freckle, grooves in her dips, her hair prickle up against her arms. Legs. But instead I fumbled over myself in another rush, nervous with a new woman, scared to touch her and receive reprimands when she truly woke up and realized what a mess I was. What a true fool I am.

“I like this.”

“Me too.”

Her insouciant gaze tripped me, and I felt as if I had to apologize to her for looking like a fool. After all these years I could never carry myself the way she did. Mostly too awkward, embarrassed to hold myself to any esteem I wished to have. A girl who I tried very hard to keep from realizing that my social capital was next to nothing.

It was hard to fully embrace the quietness, even watching the dust filter up in the air made me anxious. Light seeped into the bedroom, illuminating the blue walls, frames, books, bouncing off the mirrors. Paired with the scent of her hair under my chin, I molded her a new figure into shape. This is her. And just like that, she put me at ease.

In the moment, I was drawn to her. Tracing her upper lip and finding puzzles in her cupid’s bow invited me, intoxicated me, and I pulled forward. I pulled her body closer, pressed it up against mine, and my cock hardened- pulsed up hard as an arrow. I moved up and down her arms and legs. Holding her ivory curves reminded me of stroking my parent’s old dining room table. A reclaimed walnut wood, with the smoothes edges, and my fingers brushing it every dinner, when my father and I spoke to our food instead of our eyes. When I could only ask questions that would provoke an answer, or otherwise be silence. The wood played a distraction to that time, when I couldn’t control the look on my face, but now her soft skin would be medication to soothe my wounds. Was this happiness? The floodgates had opened, and these old gates don’t even remember the last time euphoria had met it at its door.

And the sway of her hips followed so orderly. Was it because of last night that we could connect on this raw level? We made love, and then we fucked. It was important to differentiate the two. Because fucking only involved the animalistic nature of pounding a throbbing cock into a woman’s sweet cunt. But the love making, which our morning teetered between, was so sensual, so alert, so self-aware, so other-aware. It felt like a language.

Your simple English arrives me so. Your home, I derive pleasure and song. Like my mother’s coos in her mother’s tongue, and her mother’s before. Generations of soothing sisters could not have rendered such an amazing peace, the warm bosom against the side of my face. Being so hyperaware of every sensation, the ends of her hair tickling your cheek, and yet a heart rate so still you could’ve pronounced me dead on the scene. No movement was deliberate, no anxious second guessing before making the turn. Yet you satiate me so, like nothing ever has made me whole.

Your words at night were like the bed time story, of the boy who woke up late to school one day and lost his way. A boy who would cry out for “mother!, mother!” because only her embrace and salvation could save a boy’s regretful awakening.

But then the rude awakening, breath and hesitation ensued. “Did you want to get breakfast?”

An assembly line of thoughts paged through my mind: past, present, future. In an instance I and what our future could be. Breakfast, and then breakfast the next morning. Waking up to her honey melody, and making music every morning like today’s. I saw myself returning to this apartment, years later, with even the desire to spend the rest of my life with her. To make children in this bed. Conception. And then fear, dismay, embattlement.

I said no to her.

I thought to myself, it’s better this way. To get involved again, and then have it all wasted away on her sleeping with another man, or worse a best friend.

Immediate regret filled my stomach into my throat, until swallowing it could burst into a cry. Fuck. I couldn’t go home knowing that I’ve fucked it up again. This was ultimate homesickness, or premium self-loathing. And the trick for self-loathing that I used were lost. No distractions, no TV, computer, or phone to call me out of this one. But it was too late, my shirt was on and I was buttoning the last two holes. Then out the door the next, without a word.

I’m so glad that the keyboard of my laptop is readily available to me, to access the internet to match works of literature and thought to my own in a array of constant thought. The internet speeds match up my own brain waves. The buzz of activity ringing, and telephone cords of dial-up aligning.

That day I walked down 42nd Street subway station, under the horrors of Times Square, I remarked aloud, “Wow! So many people! They just feel like cameos in my life.”

Like animals, we want to be in the in-group. Protected, accepted.

Letting others determine your self-worth. Self-worth.

We all admire a natural beauty, a woman who holds her own ground without much care as to what others may think of her. As effortless. But this privilege of seemingly natural beauty comes only to those who are deemed beautiful in the eyes of the public. Who are rewarded this attribute. Because they are casted as superior, they are granted this freedom to walk, to think, on their own two feet. And that is profound beauty in any language, because confidence is beautiful.

Some of us normal folk can only achieve a fraction of these elite’s confidence by adapting their styles, fashions, behaviors, mannerisms. It’s all such a tragedy. Because rarely is self-worth, confidence, esteem, ever found within oneself.

It’s as if we give the power of confidence to our peers, and have them determine when and if we are fit enough for the golden seal of approval.

Do not fret, I think it is an absolute mistake to give beautiful people the freedom of expression, to somehow become the beacon of light, the spokesperson of the world. Yet, I contribute to this mess all the same, praising and admiring people for their looks.

We pose as if the camera is always front facing. The spotlight on us, embarrassingly laughing at our own mistakes.

We love narratives of beautiful people who reject all rationale, and live and feed off of the hedonism of emotions. To be directed by a flow of a mood, to alluring high cliff, approaching their downfall. Because that’s what it feels like to be alive. We become, uncharacteristically, so human.

Matisse isn’t an artist renowned for being “one-of-a-kind,” but instead an ordinary man, just like any one of us, who took the task of displaying art. He embodies the life that would have been, of a man who took up the art, specific to that time period.

It’s his relatability that astounds us, not his “uniqueness.” His lines are easy to understand, because his sketches are products of the same learned lessons of handy work we have all taken up in primary school. He just unleashed that tool well into adulthood.

There should be no reverence when taking up Matisse’s work, except comical joy. A peculiar vision we all once had, in the late summer sloth fever, in seaside resort.

I think people with “mental disorders” are addicted to emotions, and how it feels. Because only in these extreme moments of sadness and euphoria, do we ever feel more ALIVE.

And heartbreak rejection hurts more because it’s a thing we have admitted to ourselves, and other person, as something we REALLY want. And our self-centered minds cannot fathom that cut to our ego. It’s aggravating, extremely mad. We cannot accept it, and we refuse to. But the reality is, we cannot have that person. No action we do will suffice, and therefore we take up our disappointment in emotions, and constant, unhealthy, thought.

Reality as art: Louis CK (Comedy), David Foster Wallace (Essays), Edward Hopper (Painting), Ted Hughes (Poetry). Music and images where our language fails us, with a shortage of vocabulary. Because I hate pop art that speaks universal truths without analyzation, without the self-awareness necessary to produce profound change and meaning.

Drowning, dead, senseless, in a pool of amniotic fluid. This morning I woke up to a dream, where I couldn’t stop the overflow of scrambled eggs and avocado from coming out my left ear.

These days have been filled with spontaneous company and mixed drinks, and new arenas. It’s such a lovely carefree life. I don’t want it to end, but I want to bury the uncertainty.

I don’t feel close to anyone, and I have the pleasure of making the excuse. The excuse that people aren’t close to themselves- more like out of touch with their sensitivities, their scary vulnerabilities. This audacious statement may only work for so long.

A week ago, I stepped backwards, and the time capsule of poems I left could only mask the sadness. But the true test lied within strength. 2016 was a crusade, to save myself by loving other men but it never worked out.

Men are so easy to shrug off emotions as some sort of buddhist nirvana redemption shit. You don’t get a pass for being a fuck boy just by one magic word. Because that code doesn’t exist. Being a “nice guy” doesn’t absolve you of blame. Fuck boys exist in every age of life

I got tired of loving myself and loving you, you and all of you. So we will find out what crusade 2017, my choice of chaos or control.

So today I’m not waiting, not expecting, until the day a man can offer me his heart, a heart that has been housed in a body and mind that was strong enough to love himself.

You there. Yes, you. Poor soul. From a small coastal town, with so much room to grow, but so little seedlings to pair with. They always told you that the cross country move would be so much better for a soul like yourself, because you could find other creatures just like you! On a safari to a more similar you, and to be surrounded by like-minded individuals with colors as bright as yours.

But instead you arrive at your destination, after long anticipation, just to find silly geese with cotton candy paint on their wings, and a symphony of nocturnal rats, too afraid to come out in the day, too scared to witness their reflection. To live blissfully in the dark and in denial was the reality of this promised land. For four years, she dined with the commoners at night, adapting to their schedule and habits, because the rats were more tolerable than the geese. You were forced to second guess people who couldn’t speak honestly, across the dinner table they sat.

Everyone too insecure to open up and show kindness, because we all have been crushed by monstrous stomps. Opening that vulnerability up would just pound that weak inner child in between cracks of concrete.

You are not like that my dear.

But of course, we are migrating creatures, with no loyalty to a country or force. Just as the birds leave for warmer weather, so must we, to find like-wise warm creatures. Never leaving a trail or imprint behind.

And so the journey never ends for some people. The rats never leave their holes, and the rest of them grow old and satisfied. Not just content with the season, circumstance or their partner, but making the decision to stop challenging themselves. Never to test their intellect, their wit, their emotions, and dreams.